


Anabasis

by MrProphet



Category: Planet of the Apes (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-08
Updated: 2014-04-08
Packaged: 2018-01-18 15:55:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1434244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>The Rise of the Planet of the Apes continuity belongs to 20th Century Fox.</p></blockquote>





	Anabasis

The plague hit the world hard. In the aftermath, we were left to build from scratch and each had to play his part. My team was sent to make contact with others, across the country and across the world. 

The first part was easy enough, all it took was time, but then we reached the sea. It was hard to get anyone to trust us, and even if we could, the ports – air and sea – had been the first places hit by the virus. The pilots and the sailors had lived long enough to spread the infection and then died, and precious few carried those skills onward.

We pushed north, and got lucky in a village in Nova Scotia. Most of the residents looked at us with the same suspicion as anyone else, but there was a man there who came from France; he wanted to get home, needed hands to help him sail there, and was desperate enough not to care whose hands they were.

We lost Rufus there; the fear of crossing the ocean on that little boat was too much for him. The rest of us felt it too, but we kept going, driven by our sense of mission. It was Zara who explained it best.

“We see a purpose to the journey,” she said, “and that means more to us than any fear, because it means more to us than our own lives.”

She was right, although it was something that was new to all of us, and it was seeing it in Captain Duvalier that brought it home to us. He was willing to do whatever he had to for a chance of seeing his kin; we were willing to do the same.

The crossing was rough, but only Galen didn’t make it. He gave his life to save us all in a storm. His body was lost, but Duvalier said that that was only right; that Galen might have been new to it, but he was a sailor through and through, and a sailor should go to the sea. The Captain introduced us to another new concept that night; prayer.

We landed at Le Havre and made our way inland from there, but the plague had been thorough. Before we left, we helped Duvalier to build a pyre for his family. I thought that he would have been broken after that, his purpose gone, but I was wrong.

“When life takes away your reason for living like that, you find another,” he told me. “I’m going to see you on your way, and then I’m going looking for anyone else who lived through this.”

True to his word, he taught Zara and Massey to drive one of the trucks that was now ownerless, and showed us how to tend and refuel it.

“If you need to pick up a new one, grab something else like this,” he told me, “something old. They’re simple; much easier to look after than the newer kind.” I thanked him and we pressed on. We didn’t talk about it much, but I knew we had all been impressed by the old man. We’d never known a human like him.

We passed through the land, seeking out zoos and sanctuaries where other apes might have survived. In some places, we found small troops who had broken out of their cages; in others, we found only the dead, trapped and starved when their keepers died. In the warm south we found a sizeable group of mixed species being tended by humans. The humans were startled by our appearance, and our intelligence, but they had been kind to the apes in their care and were willing to let us speak with them.

As we had found elsewhere, the humans’ plague had not affected apes, just as we could not infect humans. The animus transformed within us after infection, however, and what we carried, harmless as it was to humans, swiftly began to work on the new apes.

Zara stayed with them, and one of the humans came with us across another sea to Africa. We sailed out and around the coast of this Africa , to the place where our guide, Christoph, told us we would find many apes.

What we actually found was cruelty beyond imagining.

We learned that the plague struck Africa after Europe; they had time to hear something of what was happening in America and they decided that we, the apes, were to blame. By the time we found the bodies of our kind displayed on crosses around what had been a zoo, our presence had been noticed, our boat destroyed.

Christoph knew the country from before and he led us deeper inland, to where hunting parties sought out the last of our kind. We gathered those we could, and where we had to, we hunted the hunters. We lost some, gained more, kept travelling; we had no choice, surrounded by enemies as we were.

We lost Christoph in a place called Uganda, and I prayed for him. He was all that his fellow humans were not, and without him we would not have made it so far, nor with more than two thousand surviving chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas. We had seen ten, twenty times that many slain, but with all that was ranged against us, it was no small thing to come through at all.

In France, we found that Zara had taken half of the troop in search of orang-utans. We continued to range north and east in search of zoo populations until Zara came back, almost two years later, with a few hundred orangutans, and reported that more were established in their homelands.

We had been travelling for almost five years by then, and decided it was time to stop. We don’t know if we will ever hear from Caesar again, but we did what he asked of us; we found our kin and saved as many as we could. We found purpose, and we still have it, building a life for our tribe.

We also saw horror; humans reduced to the slaughter of their own kind. That is why when we came to settle, our first law was our most important.

Ape shall never kill ape.

**Author's Note:**

> The Rise of the Planet of the Apes continuity belongs to 20th Century Fox.


End file.
